Archive for the ‘Performances’ Category

Just had a call from Rachel at Eagle Music Shop here in the UK that she has shipped my new Koloa KU-650 baritone uke out today. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. I’ll be stringing it up with a set of Ken Middleton’s new High D Living water strings after having seen his lovely ‘noodling’ vid on UU forum – check it out here:

We all know that the Loveable Rogues got fast tracked to the televised finals of BGT but it was great to see yet another young act featuring the ‘bonsai guitar’. They have real talent and mega ‘user friendliness’. Their exposure has gone stratospheric but it remains to be seen if their appearances on BGT has undermined their ‘street cred’ or become a stepping stone to stardom – watch this space.

I think this girl from Scotland could be the next ‘big thing’. I was lucky enough to see Adele perform a long time before her all conquering album ’19’ was released. Something about Zoë reminds me very much of Adele just as she was getting everything together.

This planxty by the blind Irish harpist (harper if you are Irish!) is played so beautifully, on what I think is a Bruko uke, that it it sounds as if it really is being played on a harp. I’ve been playing it myself for the past few days (tab here http://ukulelehunt.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/solobuch.pdf on page 20 – thanks Ukulele Hunt!)

Over the past 3 months I’ve joined a Uke club http://www.marlowuke.co.uk/ , bought my first uke , sold it to buy a better one and have now concluded that size does matter – I need a Tenor uke.

Note the use of the word need as oppose to want……

In common with a lot of obsessives of my gender/age (I’ll let you guess… ) I tend to do a lot of research when I get interested in stuff and during my regular trawls for uke related stuff I’ve discovered a veritable cornucopia of reviews, club sites, song books, blogs and things that just make me smile.

It’s my intention to share some of the stuff that I have most enjoyed and in doing so hopefully I’ll provide yet another resource for other ukeaholics.

I promise that I’ll avoid the use of Hawaiian words/phrases wherever humanly possible.